The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Thursday, April 25, 2013

Running ape meets Evoculture

Knuckle, senescent white male

Time, sethren, to consider the organism.

The organism.Raise
your right index finger where you can see it clearly.Keep it there, and rotate it clockwise as
seen if you were looking out along your arm, which you aren’t, thus
demonstrating the potential independence from the realworld of the ideoverse, where you are looking along your arm.Dogs can’t do this, and only in part because of
anatomical shortcomings.Now rotate that
finger about the metacarpophalangeal joint, the proximal knuckle, sether, bottom,
bottom, no, not your arse, sether, and the wrist, and then about the
elbow.Just watch those interdependent
hierarchies of concepts whizzing past in your ideoverse.Metacarpophalangeal doesn’t often get much of
an outing.It’s hardly a familiar demon,
but look how it’s hogging the limelight here.Alas, in vain.What chance does metacarpophalangeal
(its last desperate mememe) have of ousting knuckle from any gang of
demons.Not room for both, I’m afraid,
and anyway, there’s only one metacarpophalangeal joint in the human hand, there
are fourteen knuckles. Without the
praxis of anatomy, I guess the metacarpophalangeal joint would be long extinct in the metaverse.

With luck, your finger tip is now in contact with your nose,
or thereabouts.Or maybe your
mouth.Whatever, you are touching the
human organism.So are you sether Albert,
but I should stop if I were you unless you want to be taken away for a good
talking to by yon community police person.

Try to imagine this organism upon which you have your
finger, without Evoculture.If you had
been raised by a pack of wolves, or dogs, or even dolphins, were you
sufficiently aquatic, that is exactly how you would be.Totally devoid of Evoculture.You would be a wolf, or a dog, or a dolphin
but, in all categories, physically very ill-equipped.If you were a wolf or a dog, you might be
able to compensate for your inadequacies with the evolved hand, pulling out
thorns for instance.Your vastly
superior processing power might prove useful in some situations, but that’s
doubtful.It, your brain, has access to
very little of the stuff it has evolved over three million years to process, so
the possibility of, say, doing a little building work round the lair may well
not occur in the neural substrate, and would probably not be socially rewarded even if it it were translated into action.To dolphins you would be even more useless,
even though dolphins might have a developed but wholly proximate ideoverse,
unlike dogs.By wholly proximate, I mean
the ideoverses are wholly organism-based.Such ideoverses could for instance result in complex social interactions, games,
hunting cooperation, even meeting groups of Evocultured-up human organisms for
joint ventures, hopefully involving killing third parties, fish, rather than
the humans killing the dolphins, as found among the Faroe- and Japanese.But nothing uses the environment of the
dolphin’s brain to evolve.Nothing.The downside of flippers, maybe.On the other hand, put a human baby in a
dolphin’s environment and the downside of everything else, including hands,
becomes apparent.

So, the organism without Evoculture.Homo
sapiens with nothing but the brain and the real world, the world before the
hominins.Little more than a running ape
with a good cooling system.That’s what
you would have your finger on, sethren, if it wasn’t for Evoculture.

I want to call this human organism something that
differentiates it from what we know the human being + Evoculture to be.I want to call it the Ho!?, but Ho!? In our
street culture, and that’s where we fucking are, sethren, has
connotations.Ma ‘ho. Not good.But Ha!?.I like Ha!?.The grunt of surprise, followed by that hardest
concept, that concept at the heart of Evoculture, the question.

The question goes back through evolutionary history.An African Hunting Dog asks questions.Want to hunt?Tougher than me?Scared?But the repertoire is limited.The Ha!? asks the question thus.The two of us are looking in the same
direction.Concerning that which is
before our eyes, what is the case?

Or rather, it’s not the Ha!? that asks that question.It’s the Ha!?-Evoculture symbiosis.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.